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“I think that’ll last until May,” I mused a month ago of the snow mountain the neighbors and I had piled between our driveways. A few weeks over 40°F, though, and the mountain has become a mole hill.

Idaho Transportation Department highway cameras show a persistent blanket of snow to the north so we decide we’ll enjoy sunshine on trails we left unexplored in Jump Creek Canyon. I confirm through the Highway 95 camera south of Marsing that the hills there are snow free.

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Before we left, I pulled up pictures from our last visit¹ to find they were from the very same week of February, three years ago. Today isn’t so warm and dry, though. Crossing Jump Creek without wet shoes is tricky.

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Ancient tools and processed animals bones were found in the shallow caves here along Jump Creek (identified as 10-OE-3686). The findings are held at the College of Idaho’s Orma J. Smith Museum of Natural History.¹

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We deviate as before from the main path into water-birch and dogwood brambles to experience the cavernous space below massive overhangs. It’s easy to imagine ancient people finding shelter here, sitting around an evening fire that casts its warm glow on grey walls beneath the sliver of stars above.

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Within these tight and twisted spaces, the same feature may look wholly different from above or below, left or right. We can feel outraged with the assumption that different perspectives must be lies or lunacy or we can step off our usual path for a chance to see a world more amazing than we imagined.

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The drop is apparently survivable. The Idaho Statesman reported in 1925 on “Lowell McKeeth, a high school student who fell 60 feet Wednesday to a pool below the Jump creek waterfall … [but] escaped without injury by falling into several feet of water.”¹